The Fed has held its Federal Open Market Committee meeting and quantitative easing is now coming to an end as planned. At the same time, the Fed has made it clear that interest rates will be kept at their low level for a prolonged period of time. How long that is was not revealed, but it is believed that no increase will be seen until at least mid-2015 or early 2016.

The immediate question here is whether the Fed is concerned that US growth is not as robust as it needs to be in order to bring down unemployment to around 5%, which is considered by many economist to be full employment. That is why interest rates need to be at near zero.

No one believes inflation will suddenly leap to unmanageable levels, but the Fed is ready to pounce if it needs to.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen has indicted that she would like everyone to be patient. Progress is being made and the economy will get better, but it takes time.

The US economy is doing much better, but it is not nearly where the Fed wants it to be. Growth remains uneven and joblessness remains much too high.

For the emerging markets this means that they can expect fairly easy money well into next year as the European Central Bank is now finally pushing money into the European economies. Looking at their economic statistics, they will need the help of cheap money and strong in the established economies in the foreseeable future. But, at least there is hope for a better future.

The big winner is the US dollar. It has risen significantly against the euro, the pound and the yen. Expectations are that the USD will strengthen some more once the Scotland vote is out of the way.